Freaks So Chic

We watch several movies a week. Every Friday, we'll talk a little about some of the movies we watched that we felt were Worth Mentioning.

Watchers and some disturbing behavior.

WATCHERS REBORN (1998)

There are four low budget horror films based on the Dean Koontz novel Watchers, and while none of them are a direct, faithful adaptation of the source material, they do all have the same set-up: a lab has conducted classified experiments for the government that has resulted in an ultra-smart Golden Retriever and a monstrous beast that is telepathically connected to the dog and driven to kill it. Something goes wrong, the dog and the monster both escape into the night, and the dog finds people who are willing to put their lives at risk to protect it from its monster nemesis. The situation gets reset with each film, even though Watchers III is a follow-up to the events of Watchers II.

In the build-up to the release of Watchers Reborn in 1998, I was hyped. It seemed like this one had the potential to be the best Watchers movie yet. It was titled Watchers Reborn rather than Watchers IV because the script by Sean Dash was going back to the Koontz source material – and that script was being brought to the screen by special effects artist / director John Carl Buechler, who had made a really cool Friday the 13th sequel (Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood) a decade earlier. In the lead roles, Buechler cast Star Wars legend Mark Hamill and Lisa Wilcox, the heroine from A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master and A Nightmare on Elm Street: The Dream Child. This was all sounding very promising.

Unfortunately, Watchers Reborn ended up having the least amount of impact on me out of all the movies in the series. This take on the concept just didn’t work very well for me. I didn’t find the movie to be very interesting – and in terms of production value, it was not the step up from its predecessors that I expected it to be. Sure, it might look better than the Predator knock-off that was the third movie, but it’s pretty much right in line with Watchers II.

Buechler’s monster design in this movie isn’t exactly mind-blowing, either. The creature is compared to Chewbacca at one point, Bigfoot at another, and looks sort of like the giant killer teddy bear Buechler created for Demonic Toys.

Wilcox plays scientist Grace Hudson, who has been working on a project for Banodyne Industries that was meant to be an alternative to traditional military tactics. They created an ultra-smart Golden Retriever named Einstein and a monstrous beast called The Outsider, which is telepathically connected to the dog and driven to kill it. The idea was that the dog could infiltrate enemy camps and the Outsider would track it down, killing the enemy to get to the pooch. When the dog and the monster escape from the lab, the dog ends up in the care of police officer Gus Brody (Gary Collins)... briefly. When the Outsider kills Gus, Einstein is passed over to his partner Detective Jack Murphy (Hamill), who has been a mess in recent years, mourning the deaths of his wife and child.

Murphy finds new purpose when he discovers that Einstein is very smart – and in extreme danger. The effort to keep Einstein safe from the Outsider brings Grace into his life and the three go on the run together. The Outsider crosses paths with Buechler regular William Butler, our heroes meet up with Buechler regular Kane Hodder, and government agents (under the supervision of Stephen Macht as Special Agent Lem Johnson) are out to kill anyone who sees the Outsider and lives to tell the story. It doesn’t take long for the Outsider to find Einstein and his companions, but, of course, Murphy and Grace’s hearts move even faster and they have fallen in love by the time the monster shows up at their door.

Watchers Reborn is my least favorite entry in the series, but it’s still an okay creature feature and a fine time killer. None of the Watchers movies are exactly great, even though a faithful adaptation of the Koontz novel with a decent-sized budget could result in an awesome movie. But I enjoy watching the low budget, wacky adaptations we got... and wish we had gotten even more of them.

DISTURBING BEHAVIOR (1998)

The 1996 release of Scream opened the floodgates for a new era teen horror movies – which was a great thing as far as I was concerned, since I loved the teen horror movies of the 1980s and was just the right age to enjoy the new batch, since I had turned 13 the same month Scream reached theatres. In most cases, I didn’t enjoy the ‘90s and early ‘00s teen horror movies as much as I liked the ‘80s films, but I was glad to have them to watch nonetheless. I Know What You Did Last Summer, Urban Legend, The Faculty – those were good times. One of the better and most underappreciated movies of the era was director David Nutter’s sci-fi horror film Disturbing Behavior, which could have just as easily been titled The Stepford Teens.

Following the death of their older brother, teenagers Steve Clark (James Marsden) and Lindsay Clark (Katharine Isabelle) have moved with their parents to Cradle Bay, an island community in the Puget Sound. The popular kids at the high school are a group called the Blue Ribbons, who are preppy, clean-cut over-achievers who have what could be seen at the perfect outlook on life: they only care about their scholastic and athletic achievements and seem to have little to no personality. Problem is, they’re a bunch of snobs... and when they become sexually aroused, they act out in violent ways. Thanks to their teenage hormones, this happens quite often. The local police, like Steve Railsback as Officer Cox, regularly have to clean up Blue Ribbon messes, but the public doesn’t seem to notice that these kids are troubled, not even when one of them goes wild in a supermarket.

Steve falls in with a trio of outsiders: potheads Gavin (Nick Stahl) and U.V. (Chad Donella), and “girl from the wrong side of the tracks” Rachel (Katie Holmes). It’s Gavin who fully realizes there’s something terrible going on with the Blue Ribbons. He knows how dangerous they are, and he knows that each one of them used to actually have a personality until they were “lobotomized and brainwashed” by Dr. Edgar Caldicott (Bruce Greenwood). Steve sees the proof for himself when a gearhead student gets in a fight with a Blue Ribbon one day and has become part of the group the next.

Marsden and Holmes are the top-liners here, but it’s Stahl who steals the show, turning in an awesome and endearing performance as Gavin, who may not be the perfect kid, but is very intelligent and likeable. Really, screenwriter Scott Rosenberg might have overwritten the Gavin character a bit, as he is quite wordy and has a large vocabulary (this movie was the first time I ever heard the word “purveyor”), but Stahl handles the dialogue well. So it’s heartbreaking when Gavin learns that he’s next on the list to become a Blue Ribbon... and there’s nothing he can do to stop his conversion. It’s when Gavin becomes a prep that Steve and Rachel, with help from U.V. and janitor Dorian Newberry (William Sadler), have to step up and figure out exactly what is going on in Cradle Bay. And yes, Caldicott is doing some weird science on the minds of these kids.

Disturbing Behavior is great up until the halfway point, when Gavin turns, and even a bit beyond that, when Steve as an unsettling experience with Blue Ribbon girl Lorna (Crystal Cass). Things start to falter when Steve decides to take on the problem, at which point things start to happen too quick and issues are overcome too easily, allowing the film to wrap up in just under 84 minutes.

Watching the third act and seeing the credits start to roll at the 78 minute point, it becomes apparent that this movie must have been cut down substantially from what it once was – and that’s exactly what happened. David Nutter butted heads with studio executives, who just wanted a flashy teen movie and didn’t care about suspense or atmosphere. They believed teens wouldn’t sit through a movie that was more than 90 minutes long (never mind that Scream was longer than that), so they brought in another editor and carved 31 minutes out of the movie. This didn’t ruin the flick, but you can tell that something went wrong on the way to the end credits.

Even in its compromised final state, Disturbing Behavior holds up as an interesting, effective movie that deserved to be more successful than it was (the box office barely surpassed its $15 million budget) and should be more popular.